Monday, May 21, 2012

Shortly after Mark Zuckerberg tied the knot with longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan on Saturday, the Twitter jesters came out of the woodwork.

“Mark Zuckerberg has changed his status to ‘Married’,” read one iteration of a popular joke. “Priscilla Chan has changed hers to ‘Jackpot’.”

It seems, though, that the wedding’s timing had little to do with the $16 billion blockbuster Facebook IPO the day before. It wasn’t the social network’s flotation Zuckerberg was waiting for — it was Chan’s medical school graduation, at least according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. This spokesperson told the AP:

“The wedding had been planned for months and the couple was waiting for Chan to finish medical school, but the date of the IPO was a ‘moving target’ not known when the wedding was set.”

“The wedding had been planned for months and the couple was waiting for Chan to finish medical school, but the date of the IPO was a ‘moving target’ not known when the wedding was set.”

The Monday before the public offering, the same day Zuckerberg turned 28, he was in the audience at Chan’s UCSF School of Medicine commencement ceremony. He ‘checked in’ via Facebook, natch, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, writing: “I’m so proud of you, Dr. Chan :).”

Dr. Chan was never going to be a stereotypical billionaire’s wife of the many-spouses-of-Donald-Trump variety. The 27-year-old bilingual Mandarin speaker graduated from Harvard in 2007, the year after Zuckerberg would have earned his degree if he hadn’t left to focus on Facebook — or thefacebook, as it was then known.

The two dated on and off during their undergrad years, first meeting in 2004. After Harvard, Massachusetts native Chan spent two years teaching science at the prestigious Harker School in San Jose before beginning her medical studies at UCSF, one of the top programs in the country. She only moved into Zuckerberg’s $7 million Palo Alto pad in 2010.

Chan wasn’t always so certain that she wanted a career in medicine, though — at least according to a 2005 Harvard Crimson article currently making the rounds on social media. Published when Zuckerberg announced he’d be leaving Harvard, the piece includes a brief mention of Chan:

“Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the facebook?” Zuckerberg asked a passing friend.

A job at the social network never materialized, but Chan still wields an influence over Zuckerberg’s work. It was her passion for pediatrics and concern for sick children she met during her training that prompted her now-husband to add an organ donation registry tool to Facebook. As Zuckerberg told ABC’s Robin Roberts earlier this month: “[Priscilla will] see them getting sicker and then all of a sudden an organ becomes available and she comes home and her face is all lit up because someone’s life is going to better because of this.”

Contrary to the golddigger jokes pervading Twitter, Chan won’t be retiring to start a jewelry line or other such vanity project now that she and Zuckerberg are official. She aims to begin her work as a pediatrician later this year.

Chan joins a group of Silicon Valley billionaire spouses who are achievers in their own right rather than kept women or arm candy.

Laurene Powell Jobs earned an economics degree at Wharton then put in time at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch before completing a Stanford MBA the same year she married the late Apple mogul Steve. She’s the co-founder of natural foods company Terraverra and education nonprofit College Track, and a mother of three. She also serves on the boards of the New America Foundation and Teach for America.

Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google billionaire Sergey Brin, has a degree in biology from Yale and co-founded biotech firm 23andMe, a genetic testing company that gives customers an analysis of their DNA for a relatively affordable price.

Then there’s Melinda Gates, the ultimate power partner. The former Melinda Ann French earned undergrad and MBA degrees from Duke before joining a young computer company called Microsoft in the late ’80s. She helped develop well-known products like the Encarta encyclopedia and the Expedia booking tool — and met the man she’d eventually marry, Bill Gates. Since, she’s taken the lead with the couple’s Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and earned a reputation as one of the world’s foremost philanthropists.